ABSTRACT
This chapter analyses the legal-philosophical messages in three prominent Japanese manga and anime franchises: One Piece, Attack on Titan and Fullmetal Alchemist. Despite differences in their tones and target audiences, these three stories reflect similarly on the origins of legal authority, presenting it as the result of false consciousness specifically, popular ignorance about the origins and purposes of the existing social order. A metaphysical understanding of culture as an ineffable Platonic ideal transcending actual human conduct is uselessly unscientific, because it cannot support testable propositions of fact about Japanese law and society. The franchises on which the chapter focuses implicitly subscribe to a positivist understanding of law and legal authority. Deriving chiefly from HLA Hart's explication of the distinctive nature of law, modern legal positivism understands law as a system of logically structured social rules.
